Clashing with husband over coronavirus

[User24689]

Hi all. My DH is driving me nuts and I need a sounding board. He has read everything there is to read about coronavirus. We have cupboards stocked with enough food for 2 months. He has said he doesn't want to go to his nieces first birthday in 2 weeks as his parents are going and they have just returned from Rome. He's massively anxious about it all.

Whats annoying me now is he doesn't think I should be taking my youngest to playgroups etc and need to stay home with him. I'm a SAHM and groups are the only time I catch up with friends, basically. He's talking about working from home and we have just had a huge argument because he wants me to take our reception age child out of school. She's below compulsory school age so be thinks it's fine. I have explainee she will lose her school place if we just stop sending her and he keeps banging on about how in no time at all the school will be closed anyway. I really really don't want to take her out, she loves it and if I can't even take them anywhere (apparently) out of the home wtf am I meant to do with them both for the next however long he deems it necessary!
When I argue with this, he asks me what has to happen for me to decide it's time not to send her. When I said it's when the school closes he just scoffs at me as by then apparently it will be too late.
Is this normal behaviour?!?! Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with him/ calm him down?

@eeeyoresmiles you are absolutely right. They have different risk tolerance. It’s not fair to suggest the OP has misunderstood the risk. Neither is it fair to start throwing about diagnoses or MH issues with the husband.

I was standing up for@GraceBellyas I had an entire weekend of Kirkman's nastiness, in fact HQ removed the entire thread due to the nastiness on it directed towards me

Thata absolutely not true @BiBiBirdie. The thread was removed, because the pp hadnt been back and MN deemed it wasnt helping anyone.

You called for the TA, who had corona, to be sacked. Tou claimed she had been to an effect region of italy and gone to school knowing she was risk. Non of which turned out to be true.

You also started throwing the 'be kind' and claiming that no one cares about your kids. Whilst spreading lies and gossip that you heard locally and calling for that woman to lose her job. Plus causing anxiety in others, is not kind.

You throw insults and try and derail any thread, regarding this issue.

I discussed this with MN as I feel its should have been removed as it showed how many people are spreading lies and untruths and enjoying trying to make people anxious too. They had no issue with anything I wrote.

@bibibirdie

You chastised people saying they should #bekind. And yet today you have been:

• Calling some of the infected people morons

• Saying OP shouldn't have had kids if she doesn't want to stay at home for a couple of weeks solid. A particularly nasty thing for you to say.

• Implying people who don't or can't self isolate deserve to get coronavirus

Practice what you preach...

Yikes - you can't just pull them out of school indefinitely! wtf - if you were both at work this wouldn't even be an option anyway! Maybe tell him he can pull your daughter out of school and he can stay home to look after them!

This is all so ridiculous.

Rome isn't even one of the locations that has a warning up!

I'd be more worried about your children's future with regards to climate change than about this virus that probably will have little impact on your life even if you all do get it!

AND if it is the end and we are all gonna die - then at least you and your kids had fun and made the most of the last days on earth instead of hiding in your house

Your husband is being very hysterical. Is his corset too tight?

@BiBiBirdie don't you realise that a lot of people travel regularly to Europe for work? Not just to go on holiday!

Eeyore, that's an interesting way of seeing things. However, I think you've missed the risk analysis of the million and one other illnesses out there, which makes the reaction to this one irrational. IF it had a mortality rate of 50 per cent or something, maybe. But I think it's not that different to normal flu is it? As far as I know the mortality rate is lower and it's harder to transfer! I think we forget flu kills up to 650,000 per year.

Unfortunately the mortality rate is at least 10-20 times that of flu, and also the hospitalisation rate is about 15%. Combine many many more people getting it at once (because it's new) with that rate, and you have complete overwhelm of hospitals. If there aren't hospital beds for any of those 15%, then the mortality rate will go up even higher (and so will the mortality rate for other illnesses, if hospitals are swamped). It's things like that, plus seeing the experiences of people in Wuhan, that make fear of this illness quite rational.

Where you then set the bar for taking individual action rather than waiting for explicit government instructions is a separate question related in part to your individual situation and risk tolerance.

The reason for the government to close schools, if they do, will be to limit the numbers of people ill at once - it won't happen early enough to actually prevent anyone in an area being ill at all (it has to be that way). Therefore, there could well be a point where it makes perfect sense to withdraw children even though schools haven't closed yet - maybe when there are enough cases in an area for the risk of catching the illness to have gone up, but not quite enough for schools to have been closed. When you reach that point will also depend on all sorts of individual factors. I'm not sure if I'd take an infant school aged child out this week, but I'd probably be thinking about doing that earlier than I would my GCSE year child.

@Kirkman funny as they removed far more nasty comments on that thread that others, egged on by you, wrote to me than I wrote. I actually said on there I was appealing to MN to remove the thread as it had descended into a bun fight that clearly wasn't in the spirit and that I was sick of justifying myself so telling the OP what the general consensus was from parents actually directly effected by the teacher. They agreed and removed it and told me to report anymore unpleasantness directed towards me or others regards our concerns with the outbreak.
You are aware the chief medical officer for the UK has admitted they are expecting deaths? Even a small percentage works out at 670,000.
The problem with the knock on of that teacher not self isolating as per the LEA having emailed all staff at 8am Monday is my friend has lost her much needed job as her son was in one of the other schools effected and they told her as she would be around elderly people they weren't willing to have her there anymore so she was sacked. She has no recourse as she has not got the income to take them to court.
Even my DCs head is livid and said her staff would be sacked for ignoring emails of that nature or excusing it as "an accident that she didn't see it in time".

BiBiBirdie MN is not a good place for you at the moment. People will rightly challenge you see on what we are hearing from PHE and WHO and all the other medical and scientific authorities.

Also, despite all the reassuring messages about it mainly affecting people with preexisting conditions and old people, it's not black and white. Young healthy people can have severe illness too. I'm not saying that to justify what the dh here is proposing, just to point out that it's not irrational in itself. It might be that the costs of early action to reduce the risk to zero would outweigh the benefits, this week, for most people, but that's different to it being irrational or hysterical.

And I'm not @Abraid2
If you think you can bully me into a flounce- hell no
I suggest you do some reading yourself. There are a lot of us who know our government are not going to admit the true facts of this, the fact the NHS won't cope due to their chronic underfunding.

My understanding though is that the less severe cases will never be recorded. So 15% of those identified may require hospital treatment but if you feel well enough just to look after yourself at home and then recover no one "official" will ever know you even had it?

I'm not suggesting we should ignore it entirely, a proportionate response is appropriate. Who will look after all the children of those required to keep the bins collected, the hospitals running, the utilities functional etc etc. We have to be realistic.

You are aware the chief medical officer for the UK has admitted they are expecting deaths? Even a small percentage works out at 670,000

How have you worked that figure out? Is it based on the whole population contracting COVID-19?

You are aware the chief medical officer for the UK has admitted they are expecting deaths?

But...of course they are expecting deaths. It would be exceptionally strange for the Chief Medical Officer not to anticipate there would be deaths from a new virus strain.

It's based on if a certain percentage amount died of the population

Tell him to contact the Head teacher about the school attendance/withdrawal.

Re the family returning from Rome, that shouldn’t be a problem, but I can understand why he would be stressed about that.

Also, I would plan some things to keep your DD from climbing the walls if the school does shut. Things like puzzles/den building/indoor /garden picnics.

But not everyone will get the virus! The very VERY worst case scenarion is something like 80%. Then you have to look at the fact that the death rate varies between certain sectors of the population. 670,000 deaths is a ludicrous figure to come up with.

Unless he's prepared to live like this til mid June, he is massively unreasonable. It's a 3 month stretch ahead of us.

His parents should stay away for a 2 week period, as that's more sensible. If DH has done all this research he will know it doesn't seem to affect children very badly

As someone said on Radio 4 said yesterday.....Corona is affecting people's brains way before their bodies.....it's ridiculous and getting into 'my cousin's girlfriend's parent's hairdresser's dog-walkers' uncle' has tested +ve scenario

My understanding though is that the less severe cases will never be recorded. So 15% of those identified may require hospital treatment but if you feel well enough just to look after yourself at home and then recover no one "official" will ever know you even had it?

When they give these numbers, they are allowing for their best estimates of unidentified milder cases. Obviously we're all desperately hoping there are loads of those, but in one of the recent WHO updates they said there probably weren't that many after all. So I'm not sure we can count on it.

China still has vast numbers of people living under extreme restrictions. It has cost them a fortune. Children in Hong Kong have not been to school for weeks and aren't about to go back yet. Italy is considering locking down another area and is already has pressure on intensive care beds, even with only a few thousand cases. We are a few weeks behind them and hopefully can learn from their experiences.

Well being with someone recently returned from Rome might concern me a little tbh.

But if there are still 2wks to go that should be enough to put his mind at rest, shouldn't it?

The OP is being sensible, her DH is being hysterical.

If his dp have just come back from Rome then they should think about keeping to themselves for two weeks just to be sure.

I think excluding your dc from school and groups is over the top. You can't do this indefinitely, you could be looking at over 18 months

It’s not remotely realistic to suggest 670,000 deaths ffs